TRUTH I say TRUTH

So of course on the heels of killing over an hour in the afternoon reading the 3 parts of that Errol Morris essay/blog about truth in photography, I go to see Rashomon at the Castro yesterday evening.

Morris, in responding to some of the comments to his original pieces, talks about Rashomon briefly. Asserting that it is not in fact about Truth, as commonly quick-crit-hit will tell you, but about human weakness /inability to see or tell truth. That is to say, something did happen in the grove btw the bandit, woman & samurai and that is the Truth. The physical evidence and stories could all be put together to reveal this Truth of what happened. The conflicting stories of the four different eye-witness accounts only reveal how people try to skew and hide and manipulate the Facts to their own ends.

Later he extends this when discussing "post-modernists"

That “step further” you refer to is a significant difference. I do not believe — contra the postmodernists — that truth is socially constructed. There are big differences between each of the following claims:

(1) Truth is socially constructed or, worse yet, subjective;

(2) Truth is in principle absolute but we cannot know it; and

(3) Truth is knowable, but there are endless impediments to knowing it. (One of the greatest impediments is that people tend to ignore it or reject it even when presented with it.)

I am a proponent of the third view.

Is this just Morris' "God doesn't play dice" or is he just being a stick-in-the-mud? How can something be both knowable but knowing endlessly impeded? Perhaps he means seemingly endless, or just sort of endless, but not really, but if endless=infinity doesn't that = unknowable? In the end I think he's trying to make one point, Sontag's interpretation of Truth in photography by making a lesser related, but not identical point Sontag was stretching when she used the 'posing' of early photography to make a point about the Truth of photography. Why go to the Crimea when all you really wanted to say was something about how Photography (like All representation) has no truth value other than that assigned to it by a frame? Why determine, or try to determine, whether one photo came first? The only product is that it concretely shows the point that what we see in the photograph is determined by our perspective.

Erg. So my laziness leads to more confusion and no real point other than I think Morris is relying on the "hard work = validity, worth" crutch to make a not to solid or interesting point about how he doesn't feel comfortable with the destabilization of Deterministic Truth.